Ramblings about Advertising, Social Media and the Music Industry

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What happens when the elephant in the room decides to change its stripes? If you haven’t noticed, Facebook has been playing with a lot of features on the site from the chat to grouping news feed posts by interest, and even making the “share with friends” function almost impossible to find.

Fortunately thanks to the backlash online by marketers, and a little competitive kick from Google+, Facebook has rolled out a few new changes designed to help the overall Facebook experience from both individual users’ privacy and access for businesses.

Starting with the user, there are tightened security controls about what can or can’t be posted on your wall without your consent. For those of you with millions photos of yourself tagged in Jordan Sneakers, High Heels, and Stripper photos, you now will be able to reject the tag before it goes up on your wall!

From the official Facebook Blog: Review tags before they go on your profile
Now you can choose to approve or reject photos and other posts people tag you in before they appear on your profile. To turn this on, go to the Manage How Tags Work section of your privacy settings and turn on Profile Review.

For businesses, you’ll notice now that on many sites, when you want to share a page or an article etc, you have a whole new set of options to share to. You can share to your personal profile, a friend’s wall, in a private message, or even to any of your pages. You also can choose whom you’d like the message to go to. If you’ve been using Facebook groups you’ll have those, but also can even post to geographic region on a page.

Two major Facebook API Platform Policies were also removed from documentation:

FPP IV.4: You must provide users with an easily identifiable “skip” option whenever you present users with an option to use a Facebook social channel.

FPP IV.5: You must not provide users with the option to publish more than one Stream story at a time.

In plain English FPP IV.4 means that before any app was allowed to publish something to your wall it needed your permission. Now you are giving that permission upfront.

IV.5 is a huge #WIN for anyone who manages a page. Now you have the ability to share to a page directly from a 3rd Party site etc. I’ve found this most successful on Youtube lately, as when I just copy and paste links I don’t get the nice preview so fans can play the video within the wall.
From Facebook:

Publishing multiple Stream stories via a single share option can be an effective tool in enabling communication among friends and creating a more natural sharing flow for the user. Examples of positive use cases are enabling users to share gift cards, events, and concert tickets that they have purchased for more than one friend, without requiring the user to click on multiple share options.

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About

Nick Cicero is a Social and Digital Marketing Strategist, Musician, and Writer. He has developed innovative campaigns for brands like Sony PlayStation, Oprah Winfrey Network, Winn-Dixie, Teen Vogue, Allure, Lady Gaga, Sports Illustrated, more. He’s a fan of playing trumpet, vinyl records, blogging and staying active in the music industry. Nick lives in New York City.